Modern hospitals utilize medical images from a variety of imaging devices such as, for example, a Computer Tomography (CT) scanner or a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner. The image data are then stored and transmitted using a computer network—typically comprising client-server architecture—to enable medical professionals to view and diagnose the captured medical images at a convenient workstation placed, for example, in a medical professional's office.
Present day imaging devices provide images with ever increasing resolution and facilitating or even enabling medical professionals' diagnostic capability. This improvement in resolution results in a substantial increase of the size of the image data, in particular for diagnostic quality medical images. The increase in set size is accompanied by substantially increased processing speed of computers and workstations for processing and displaying of the image data.
Unfortunately, this development is not accompanied by a similar increase in transmission speed for transmitting the image data, for example, from a server computer performing an image rendering process and a client computer displaying the image data and providing user interaction. For example, for large image data sets of diagnostic quality medical images transfer time for transmitting the image data between a sever computer and a client computer is too long to be useful for many user interactive applications.
It would be desirable to overcome the drawbacks associated with the transmission of large image data sets.